No Thayn No Gain

We can only pick one incumbent senator in LD14, and Steven Thayn gets it

I sometimes wonder if the committees that redraw district boundaries feel perverse joy in pitting incumbents against each other. Like a sadistic child that captures insects in a jar hoping they will fight, the mapmakers get to sit back and watch the fireworks. The new maps for 2022 mean that two-term Senator C. Scott Grow of Eagle will face five-term Senator Steven Thayn of Emmett. The voters of District 14 will reelect one, while sending the other into retirement.

On the other hand, perhaps some attrition in the Senate is a good thing. The latest Freedom Index score from the Idaho Freedom Foundation gives a number to what many of us feel in our hearts, that the Senate is noticeably further left than the House. I asked IFF President Wayne Hoffman about this discrepancy when I interviewed him last week. He suggested that the House has had more turnover recently, allowing it to better reflect the increasing conservatism of the Idaho electorate.

Source: Idaho Freedom Foundation

Perhaps redistricting will be a blessing in disguise. The contest in District 14 leaves a vacant seat in District 10 where Representative Tammy Nichols is facing Scott Brock, who lost GOP primaries in 2018 and 2020. While Nichols is rightly known as a conservative firebrand, Brock has accused Nichols of accepting bribes in return for votes as well as allegedly improperly implied an endorsement from the Farm Bureau. A victory by Representative Nichols would immediately move the Senate further right.

What about District 14? We have a choice between Senator Grow, Senator Thayn, or a woman named Katie Donahue, who as far as I can tell has not done any campaigning, and whose Twitter feed suggests her main issue is marijuana legalization, among other interesting positions. So, as I said, we have a choice between Senator Grow and Senator Thayn.

I have had several opportunities to speak with Senator Grow over the past two years, and I have also had several conversations with Senator Thayn over the past few weeks as well. I find them both to be intelligent, pleasant, and good-natured. At a District 14 meeting earlier this year they each pledged to run a clean campaign without any personal attacks, and as far as I can tell both have kept their word.

Both men are influential: Senator Grow is vice-chair of the Senate Finance Committee, and therefore sits on the powerful Joint Finance-Appropriation Committee, while Senator Thayn chairs the Senate Education Committee. Grow has only a 39% freedom index score from the IFF, while Thayn’s 58% is better, but not great.

Numbers alone do not tell the whole story, which is why I felt it important to get to know both men before making any recommendations.

Cecil Scott Grow has been a CPA, a small business owner, and served two terms on the Meridian School Board, which is now part of the West Ada School District. Senator Grow comes from a finance background, and his legislative priorities reflect that. When speaking at meetings he spends most of his time discussing where our tax dollars are being spent. As a member of JFAC, Grow has a hand in managing the state’s $13 billion budget.

In the last session, he championed a radical proposal that would completely eliminate property taxes, aside from levies and bonds, and make up the difference with a small increase in the sales tax. I strongly support this measure, as I believe that property taxes are a permanent government lien on your home, which is awful and immoral. While I wish that we could cut state government rather than raising the sales tax, the end result would not be the end of the world. Sales taxes are spread out much more broadly on the populace than property taxes, making it a more equitable way of funding government. Concentrating taxes at upper income levels is a left-wing proposition, not a conservative one.

Senator Grow used a lot of time and political capital in the 2021 session trying to push through a constitutional amendment banning drugs. While I personally think drugs are indeed bad, and do not support legalization, neither do I think it is the hill to die on. Grow’s endeavor did nothing in the end but make a lot of potheads really angry with him.

When the legislature reconvened in 2021, ostensibly to do something about vaccine mandates, Senator Grow came prepared with several good bills that would have protected employees from these tyrannical edicts. The Senate sent them to Senator Fred Martin, chairman of the Health & Welfare Committee, who promptly threw them in the trash. Senator Martin takes thousands of dollars from Big Pharma, sits on the Idaho Immunization Board, and sees nothing wrong with corporations forcing their employees to take experimental immunizations.

Committee chairs using their power to trash good bills is a recurring problem. I have said before that this is a game they play to avoid having to commit to a vote on a controversial subject. Legislators come to their voters and say “We tried!” while perhaps assuring their big business lobby friends that there was never a danger of these bills passing. Senator Grow did the former, telling a local conservatives group that there was nothing more he could do once the bills were referred to Senator Martin. I asked him if he could support changing Senate rules to require that committees at least vote on bills, and he immediately dismissed the idea. My impression is that Grow’s overriding concern is for the continued maintenance and legitimacy of the Senate as a governing body, so I doubt he will ever be a firebrand in the mold of Tammy Nichols or Priscilla Giddings.

Steven Thayn is not a firebrand either, but he is very knowledgeable about history and philosophy. Thayn has lived in Gem County for six decades, representing Emmett in the House during the 2000s and serving in the Senate since 2012. Interestingly enough, Thayn graduated from the same class at Emmett High School as future Governor Brad Little in 1972. Thayn has worked as a farmer and a high school teacher for many years, so it is no surprise that his focus in the legislature is education policy.

Senator Thayn has championed several interesting bills regarding education policy. For example, the Advanced Opportunities Program allocates money to high school students that they can use to take college classes, AP tests, CTE exams, and more. This enables high-achieving students to earn college or workplace credits much more quickly than if they had to wait until after graduation, and it saves money in the long run as well.

Senator Thayn has also been working with his protege, House candidate Caleb Hoobery, to allow students at Emmett High School to use a curriculum produced by the excellent Hillsdale College in Michigan.

Thayn has come out in support of school choice, writing in a pamphlet:

From my perspective, educating your own children is a God-given right, or as I prefer to call it an “inalienable responsibility” that the government should not usurp.

It gives me some comfort that Thayn sees things from this perspective. Too many elected leaders, even Republicans, see homeschooling as a usurpation of the government’s supposed role in educating your children.

As much as I feel a desire to tear the entire corrupt public school system to the ground and start over from scratch, that is not realistic, and Senator Thayn’s approach looks to be a pragmatic way of moving in the right direction.

Indeed, Wayne Hoffman of the Idaho Freedom Foundation recently interviewed Senator Thayn and they had the same debate that I have been having with myself for months now. Why is the pace of education reform so slow? How can we speed things up and get things done so that no more children are chewed up by a school system that not only fails to teach basic math, grammar, and history, but instead indoctrinates the next generation with awful ideas of racial division and sexual deviancy?

At least Senator Thayn is moving the system in the right direction. What impresses me the most about Thayn is that he really understands the fundamental problems with American society today. He recognizes that the issues plaguing our community did not spring up from nowhere in 2020, 2008, or in the 1960s, but have been festering for more than a century. Any conversation with Thayn will eventually turn to Cicero, natural law, Adam Smith, and the gradual usurpation of the role of the family by government. Thayn points to four events that eroded family sovereignty in America:

• 1852: The State of Massachusetts created the first compulsory public education system. We now take it for granted that the government controls education.

• 1933: President Franklin Roosevelt expanded the administrative state with the New Deal, redefining the role of government to that of managing the economy and taking care of the people.

• 1965: President Lyndon Johnson instituted his Great Society, creating the American welfare state.

• 2010: President Barack Obama brought healthcare under government control with Obamacare.

Senator Thayn recognizes that returning to a family-centric society cannot happen overnight. He wants to create what he calls “off-ramps” from government systems, incentives for people and families to begin taking care of themselves again. I sometimes find him too optimistic, to be honest. It is nevertheless refreshing to speak to someone in government who not only recognizes the fundamental problems with our society but is actively working on fixing them. Too many Republicans just accept the status quo and act as if their job is to manage our decline into socialist totalitarianism.

When a PC recently asked why we should pick him over Senator Grow, Thayn replied that while Scott Grow is one of many in the Senate focused on finance, he is the only one working to seriously reform education.

Steven Thayn gets it, which is why I am proud to endorse him for reelection to the Senate for District 14.